One man and world tragedy

Before the war, it is important to get the pre-war pinned into focus. War is what each participant now prepares for with an ever more unrelenting eye as January 15 approaches.

When, or just possibly if, it happens, what led to it may be forgotten in the maelstrom. As the horrors mount, they will obliterate what came before. It will become very easy to misperceive the past, as a way of allocating blame for the present. Before that present arrives, let us reckon up its antecedents.

This pre-war has been different from almost any other in the slow calculating build-up it has allowed all sides. The war will not happen by accident (the first world war), nor grow from small to large by negligence and indecision (Vietnam), nor consist of sudden swift attack (Grenada, Panama).

Its scale can be quite accurately pre-judged. For the US and British military, it offers an unprecedented opportunity to work out their war games and then make them real. Already, one seems to have the opportunity to watch a Gulf war that has not happened with something of the same detachment we customarily direct towards wars and battles in history.

But the space of five months has not just been taken up with military arrangement. There has also been a debate. It was slow to start, and has been of variable quality. It was less impassioned in Britain than in the US, even allowing for the Labour Party's unwillingness to lead it and the media's one-sided reporting.

But in the end, the issues were delineated. Would the war be just? Would it be winnable? Did it have a legal basis? Were there alternatives for securing the same objective? Only in a few quarters have venomous war-mongers, convinced from the start that war would be necessary and good, sought to stigmatise and silence those who asked these questions. One can say that they have all been exhaustively addressed.

What has this debate revealed? It has been especially serious in Washington, where Congressional hearings have ventilated many issues and called presidential executives to account. A struggle looms, not for the first time, over the president's right to make war without formal congressional approval. But what I believe this enormous and unusual lapse of time has most importantly done is to deprive anti-war opinion, especially in Europe, of several of their usual dialectical props.

Of course, there is still a strong anti-war case to be made. But it needs to be done without forensic cop-outs. It needs to say, if it is honest, that what happened to Kuwait does not in any circumstances justify the kind of reprisals which the UN has authorised its members to take in the interest of collective security. Kuwait is simply too small an issue for so large a response, this school says.

But by extension there is a strong whiff of a further argument: that no circumstance in this day and age would justify the kind of war that now looks imminent. This is close to pacifism. Maybe that is a proper doctrine, but it would be better if it were argued with fewer weasel words.

What have disappeared are some of the easy explanations that survived so many wars which the European Left did not like. These can mostly be included under the heading of anti-Americanism.

It is not credible, for example, to explain a Gulf war as another attempt by Washington to dominate the world. The idea that it is all about cheap oil, as if that were an exclusively American preoccupation, can also be thrown out of the window. There is nothing President Bush would rather have, I guess, than an excuse not to go to war. He is taking an appalling political risk, with public opinion going off the boil just about coincidentally with the time it takes for the war machine finally to declare itself ready for action.

An extension of the American imperium is no longer on the popular agenda. Anyone who doubts this might consider why the articulate Right have been from the start among the most prominent members of the anti-war lobby. Equally, it is notable that Washington has throughout permitted the UN to set the narrow objective of the exercise: freeing Kuwait, not removing Saddam.

It will be a pity if, as part of this objective, Iraq's nuclear potential is not bombed out of existence. But the predominance of UN agenda-setting, if not military control, further complicates the picture of an aggrandising Uncle Sam.

Nor is it credible, secondly, to argue that the US, Britain or anyone else is blundering on regardless of the consequences. This is not a drift to war, but a war that will happen after all due consideration. Again, time has made that an inescapable reality. All the consequences cannot be known, and most of us live outside the secret world where the war machine is readied for combat. But the war-gamers have not spent five months doing nothing, and the politicians have not been hustled into unalterable commitments before consulting them about what might happen. By no stretch of language can any of those most crucially involved be said not to know the enormity of what they may soon do.

Thirdly, it will be necessary, in the aftermath I'm envisaging, to recall with utter clarity who was to blame. Once again, the useful demon of Uncle Sam simply won't stand up. Surprisingly, most of the anti-war left go halfway to admitting this even now. Almost everyone has said that Saddam Hussein's iniquity must not stand. No Ho Chi Minh he. But between their resounding denunciations of him and their resounding refusal to countenance decisive measures against him, a well-meaning but obvious unreality echoes off the walls of silence.

Sanctions alone are supposed to get him out. But vastly the biggest sanction is the threat of his army's destruction and his own fall, and this hasn't shifted him. Again the sheer lapse of time carries its message. The conditions where mere economic destitution, brought about by economic sanctions, might change history do not seem to be present. Equally, direct diplomacy is urged between Washington and Baghdad, not least by Ted Heath. But who has been the prevaricator since Bush made his sensational offer to negotiate, which came close to cracking the UN alliance?

The hope to which any sane person will be devoting their prayers is that diplomacy still has a chance. Once January 15 was set, it was probable that the test of nerve would go down to the wire, and that if Saddam shifted it would be at the last moment. No doubt such an outcome was always likely, too, to be preceded by the kind of bloodthirsty rhetoric heard from both sides between Christmas and New Year.

But if there is no movement and if that is followed, as a high British official predicted to me in mid-December, by the beginning of war, it will be necessary to see it plain for what it is: a tragedy for the world, brought about by one man, which nobody else wanted and everybody else strove by every means to prevent: a disaster on many counts, from which reasonable statesmen acting in good faith could find no escape.

It will be Hussein's war not Bush's, as five months have given us every chance to understand.